Surbiton Crescent - Kingston

as captured by Mr Mustard himself

This is by way of a guest blog as Mr Mustard has copied the text from Pepipoo, an excellent advice forum on which he contributes from time to time. Credit goes to user 'ufofly' for the content.

Brief facts: Surbiton Crescent is one of the highest money grossing PCN fines £3 million or so per year.

It was decided by Kingston Council that the Surbiton Closure was to be made permanent in June 2017. However this has been called in as a result of a petition by a lead petitioner, & the council has agreed to review the Surbiton Crescent road closure on the 18th July at a full council meeting in the Guildhall at 7:30pm. 

Please come along to the meeting and make your voices heard, as this will be the only way that we can make the council understand how much we hate the closure of Surbiton Crescent!!", said Helen Hinton.

Petition is here as well as the reasons for the petition.

You may find out most of the information that you need about the Surbiton Crescent closure here.

You may find supporting documents (when available closer to the meeting date) as well as live webcast here.

Full credit to Kingston Council for having the item on an agenda of full council which none of Barnet's revenue generating spots have occasioned.

Do feel free to go along if you are interested & any report received will be published by Mr Mustard.

The other point of this blog is to make you aware of the 'flying motorbike' sign which means no motor vehicles may pass by it. Some adjudicators at London Tribunals allow Appeals due to confusing signage and others refuse them so Mr Mustard does not appear as the representative for this location, advising in the background instead, as Appellants in person have a better chance of winning.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

Newham Council out of line

Cinnamon clones

On 28 and 30 March the representations against 6 PCN for committing the same moving traffic contravention were delivered to Newham Council. The first set of representations were against 4 PCN and the second for 2 more which came along just after.

They read as follows:

This vehicle (LN08***) has been cloned. It is used during the working week in Rugby for commuting. The attached photos may help highlight differences in the actual car to your captured images.

It has been reported to Warwickshire Police under ref 123 and the Met under CHS12345 & 54321. They don't seem to issue paperwork.

The challenge is that the car has been cloned so the contravention did not occur.

Rather than issuing any more PCN it would be helpful if you were to report the car to the police if any CEO sights the car on the street.

Would anyone who was not genuine invite the involvement of the police? No.

This was one of the photos (without the redacted plate obviously)

against which the council could compare their camera footage. The number plate screws and the name of the dealer were different to the cloned car.

Mr Mustard's client has now just received, a few days within the rather too generous 3 months which councils are allowed (it is only 56 days for parking) to respond to representations about moving traffic contraventions, Notices of Rejection for 4 of them, but not the same 4 as were challenged together, only 2 of those and the 2 later ones.

This is part of what their Notices of Rejection contain:

Do you get the feeling that Newham have not studied the problem very carefully given that photographs were submitted, photographs that other enforcement authorities found to be adequate. Unfortunately for Newham, Barking & Dagenham Council cancelled, Redbridge Council cancelled, the IBIS hotel cancelled & the London ambulance service accepted that it was not Mr Mustard's client who hit one of their ambulances and sodded off. They all had similar evidence to assess.

Newham Council have issued 4 forms on which an Appeal can be made to London Tribunals. Each one of those costs Newham Council £30 so they are going to be £120 down at the end, the result of their failure to properly consider the representations. Mr Mustard wonders how often someone who lives in Rugby decides to pretend their car has been cloned and then carries out multiple driving contraventions in London? Probably never.

Mr Mustard has, during his preparations for the Appeals, realised that the wheels of the cloned car are much more fancy than the real car.

The cloned car about to pass a 'No motor vehicles' sign

The real car at home in Rugby.

Mr Mustard would send these extra photographs off to Newham and give them a second chance to cancel but as they don't provide an email address, nor a phone number to have a friendly chat on, he can't easily do that so they will just have to receive the photos with the official Appeals as he doesn't want to miss the 28 day deadline for getting the Appeals into the system.

Separately Mr Mustard has written to London Councils suggesting that they could play a role in collating information about cloned cars so that once one authority is satisfied that a vehicle has been cloned then other authorities would probably want to follow their lead and everyone would save time & trouble. Let's see what they come back with. 

Cloning is far too common and creates huge amounts of paperwork, and the necessity to prove your innocence otherwise you become guilty by default, as well as the worry that you will be financially liable for something you did not do which really is an injustice.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

Walk the Nicky line

School zig zags - do your 3 point turn somewhere else

The above is the council's justification for school zig zags which have in the main been largely respected by the driving public with only 475 PCN having been issued up until May 17.

Mr Mustard wonders why a location, such as at the school in St Joseph's Grove in Hendon (right behind the town hall as it happens) therefore has restricted hours of 8.30am to 4.30pm whereas other schools have 2 or 3 sets of times, corresponding to the likely arrival and leaving times and possibly lunch times for a secondary school if lots of children are likely to be heading out of school. He can't see a need for a restriction at 11am for example.

Mr Mustard's client was unlucky. He was driving along and then realised he needed to go the other way, he pulled up on the zig zags to use the adjoining piece of road to reverse into and at that very moment another car came along and made it dangerous to continue with the manoeuvre so he waited, which made his stop a few seconds long and then the computer controlled cctv nabbed him. You can watch it here

Mr Mustard didn't think that was cricket so yesterday he wrote to parking management as follows, and he eagerly awaits their reply:

If you watch the cctv the car stops in order to reverse into the side turning and then go the other way. This is a perfectly reasonable manoeuvre but one which your camera picked up and then presumably a human being authorised the issue of a PCN. It is necessary to stop in order to reverse direction and normally it would be for a trivial time (de minimis) but in this case the driver very considerately stopped to avoid an accident as a car was approaching and then he reversed a few seconds later.

I agree that technically the vehicle stopped and that is a contravention but it is not the mischief that the zig zags are aimed at, which is parents/guardians/etc dropping off or collecting their children. There isn't a child in the cctv anywhere. I question the need for all day enforcement.

I think this is an unfair PCN and accordingly should be cancelled.

They might or they might not cancel, we'll see. If not, an adjudicator will get to decide the matter later on.

You, dear reader, will learn from this though, won't you?

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

Grenfell Tower

Mr Mustard is nothing if not a practical soul and he didn't want any further misery (such as a bailiff taking away the only remaining asset of a survivor of the fire because the statutory notices didn't reach the vehicle owner) heaped on the survivors so he emailed a contact at London Councils, the umbrella body for councils in London, as follows:

I thought it would be a welcome relief for people who have been through a horrific experience if every London enforcement authority were to have a look through its PCN files and cancel every PCN where Grenfell Tower was the DVLA registered address.

I would do it for humanitarian reasons if it were me but the PR would do the cause of council parking and traffic enforcement no harm at all as it gets battered when things go wrong (often by me!) and councils could show that they don't just care about the money.

If some sort of concession is already being discussed do please let me know.

If you are not the best man to deal with this email, please pass it on to whoever is, within London Councils.

It wasn't long before a reply came:

Thank you for your email.

I can confirm that we have been liaising with RBKC (Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea) and a message regarding the cancellation of outstanding PCNs, warrants etc. for Grenfell Tower has been sent to all London boroughs. I can confirm that this has been met with a positive response.

I can also confirm that following discussions that RBKC have had with DVLA, the DVLA has made the decision to suppress the vehicle record for any vehicles identified as being registered to the two post codes for Grenfell Tower. As a result of this, where a vehicle keeper enquiry has been submitted on one of these vehicles (and hopefully this will not happen), the DVLA will only provide a notification letter that the vehicle is registered to this address but no keeper details will be provided.

London Councils agree that those impacted by the terrible events at Grenfell Tower do not need the added worry and burden of parking and traffic fines and we are all trying to ensure that this will not happen.

Mr Mustard had also been in touch with Royal Mail on twitter and they DM'd him their response but it is now available publicly:

Mr Mustard is quick to criticise when things are wrong but is pleased to see that, after the initial emergency response, minds were turned to possible repercussions. 

To RKBC, London Councils, Royal Mail & DVLA in particular, he says 'well done'.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

Brent's blind bailiff

21 June - the view from Marina's flat

So here is Marina's car just after it has been clamped by the bailiff. This is private property for which a permit is required so the bailiff is trespassing, not attractive to break the law whilst trying to enforce it? Sadly the warden for the private parking company did not happen along.

Now it is the case that Marina did, due to some personal events in her life, fail to fully contest a PCN from Brent Council at Bodiam Way which people are always getting wrong. This is the spot.

Mr Mustard would probably have beaten the PCN but that is academic now, you become guilty by default if you miss a deadline.

Mr Mustard visited Marina on 3 June to discuss something else. He saw that the blue badge was on display in her car. He told her to always leave the blue badge on display and she said it always was. This is why, it makes the car exempt goods which a bailiff cannot take.

So after the bailiff James Alexander March had clamped the car Mr Mustard emailed his office, the firm of Newlyn, as he didn't have the bailiff's mobile. This is what he wrote.

Mr Mustard thought that quite quickly Newlyn would realise the game was up and remove the clamp, but no, this is part of their response.

Mr March has confirmed that as the vehicle was parked in a disabled bay he checked the vehicle to see if a Blue Badge was present, which it was not.

Flip, thought Mr Mustard the bailiff cannot see, as there is a blue blob in the windscreen which could well be a blue badge and the associated clock, the very ones which were there when he himself saw the car earlier in the month.

The bailiff came back to the premises on 23 June at which time he had a second opportunity to see the blue badge. No, he still can't see it apparently, as the clamp remained on the car.

Today Mr Mustard popped to have a look at the clamp for himself, and has taken a video. If the bailiff returns now he cannot fail to see the blue badge, if he can see and if he looks and once he sees it he must unclamp the car, but will he?

Solicitors have now been instructed and doubtless the parking manager of the London Borough of Brent will have to decide whether there is a blue badge in the car or not and instruct his bailiff accordingly. It is the council who are responsible for the actions of their bailiff (in a similar case a couple of years ago at Barnet the clamp was removed as soon as Mr Mustard brought the matter to the attention of management but Brent are, in Mr Mustard's experience, and based upon certain staff he has come across, slippery). It isn't denied that there is a debt but you can't ignore the law as a bailiff and use the existence of a debt as justification. Bailiffs have got draconian powers, they must use them lawfully.

Mr Mustard doesn't really think the bailiff is physically blind, but he is being wilfully blind.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

Mr Mustard likes to fix problems before they are problems, by disposing of the PCN before it can be given to a bailiff. He doesn't have the time to deal with bailiffs as well as everything else and believes that prevention is better than cure.

The best place for bailiff advice is either your local free law centre or http://bailiffadviceonline.co.uk/

Update 27 June some time after 9am

Next step is, probably, a complaint to Brent Council as they are responsible for their bailiff's action.

Here is the bailiff's car as he removed the clamp. He is parked on private land which is for residents with permits only. He is a trespasser.

 

 

Seven to One

OK, this is 15 but you get the idea

It is the norm for new Appeals to be listed at the tribunal 4 weeks after you submit the Notice of Appeal form. For administrative convenience all of Mr Mustard's cases are listed together so that they can be disposed of with the minimum amount of the tribunal's, and Mr Mustard's time, being taken. It is Mr Mustard's duty, as a professional lay representative (an oxymoron) to assist the tribunal to come to the just decision. Of course, both sides will stress the positive parts of their case and play down the negative aspects but the adjudicator knows and levels up the playing field. If the enforcement authority do not appear he tests arguments they would have made.

Four weeks ago Mr Mustard submitted 7 new Appeals all together in a batch, 2 for TfL and 5 for Barnet Council. A week before if he hasn't received an evidence bundle Mr Mustard goes looking for it and checks the balance on the council computer to see if it has gone to zero. Usually one or two cases get discontinued by enforcement authorities who are either too busy to prepare their case or recognise that it is hopeless, although if that is the reason they should have thrown in the towel at an earlier stage rather than incur a £30 tribunal fee.

Although Mr Mustard had two evidence packs to hand, he ended up with only one live hearing (and a Review, i.e. a second go at the cherry which Mr Mustard had asked for so was always going to go ahead, although he did not get granted a Review in the end, but that is a story for another day).

So here are Mr Mustard's thoughts on the 7 cases.

PCN1

Barnet Council had forgotten to re-offer the 50% discount in response to a challenge made to the PCN on day 14. That was a nailed on win so the council sensibly cancelled the PCN. Just so you know, if a PCN is issued on 10 June, day 14 is 23 June i.e. add 13 not 14 as the day of issue is day 1.

PCN2

The motorist had driven away the instant he saw the traffic warden and had been sent a PCN in the post. It was fairly certain that the traffic warden would have been held to have only observed and not to have started preparing a PCN. The council cancelled.

PCN3

The motorist had paid but not displayed. The alleged contravention was that he had failed to pay. That was an arguable point but the council decided to cancel.

PCN4

TfL issued a PCN which had a poor description of the location where the PCN was issued. If you do not get the PCN and have to rely on a document which comes in the post then the PCN falls at the first hurdle for lack of clarity. TfL sensibly cancelled when the Appeal was logged. They often do. They have of course tried it on earlier by rejecting the identical representations.

PCN5

TfL had probably had the PCN back in the post undelivered, a fact which they didn't want aired in public, so they cancelled.

PCN6

In this case Barnet Council had made a blunder within their evidence pack, no wonder when they can run to 100 pages, and once that was pointed out to management they cancelled the PCN. Fair play to them.

PCN7

The only case to actually have a hearing. It concerned a motorist turning right out of Oak Grove into Cricklewood Lane. The analysis of the actual Regulations about when you can turn right into a box junction are interesting and Mr Mustard did not have his copy of them to hand so couldn't argue the point, he will have another go on another day:

The PCN was cancelled though because within the Notice of Rejection it does not (currently) say that the tribunal may allow more than 28 days to make your Appeal if there is a good reason (like being hospitalised perhaps) even though it does say that in the notes which come with the letter. Mr Mustard still recommends that you make your Appeal in good time and if you use the on line system it only takes 5 minutes. 

Within the 28 days either pay up or Appeal, do not do nothing as that costs you 50%

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard